Conclusion

This book has been a labor of love and a dream deferred. We sent out our initial call for chapters as the COVID 19 death toll surpassed one million worldwide. There was fear and confusion all around. We had gone through lengthy quarantine periods, travel was almost non-existent, and remote learning was the norm. Racial tensions reached a boiling point. The work of doing school changed in ways we could never have imagined.

As we were able to start venturing out in our masks, clutching our hand sanitizer bottles, we hoped the worst was over. We soon learned that new and daunting trials awaited us. Many things would never be the same. Most of us would agree that we were looking forward to getting back into our school buildings, but new and greater challenges awaited us. More than thirty years ago COPIS member Ed Pajak suggested relationship, or human relations effectiveness, was the most important dimension and the common thread among all his dimensions of supervision (1990). During the depths of the pandemic, we had to find creative ways to sustain relationships, because we suddenly realized how quickly and profoundly we suffer from isolation.